I could never buy an b/w e-reader.

How can people enjoy 16 shades of gray?  Some suggest that people generally can only see between 16 and 32 shades of gray.  I don't know.  It seems like people should be able to see between 24 and 32 shades, at the very least.

16 shades of gray, is like the 16 shades of green from that 7" green plasma screen of the Compaq Portable from the mid-80's. 


16 shades of gray is like going back to the 70's and reading print from a black and white copy machine with that lousy black ink powder that flaked off if the paper was wrinkled.


It seems okay at a shrunken, dithered image like this excerpt from Amazon's Kindle, taken from The Economist.  But if you've played with an e-reader in the store, images just look horrible.


I'd rather wait for a color e-reader, but I have a minimum 256 color requirement, which isn't exactly that good.  That's like playing with Microsoft Paint from the early 90's.  Does anyone remember how awful - by today's comparison - Windows 95 looked?



Really, how many shades of gray can the average person see, anyway?  I created this quick chart to test my eyes, and I can see at least 50 shades of gray, although because of the way Photoshop works, it won't let you do fractions of gray, so the 40-shade and 50-shade gradations are actually the same between the first two grades on the farthest left side.


I am visual; I need more than 16 shades of gray.  I don't know about other people, but I'd rather have a tablet than a b/w e-reader, especially considering that the current generation of e-readers can only do 3 fps animation.  Maybe by the end of this year, the new e-readers will have 24 fps, but I have my strong reservations about how their images will look, because instead of changing images 24 frames per second, the e-reader is actually turning on and off 24 images per second.  I have this suspicion that it will resemble more of a flickered video than a smooth video, even if running at 24 fps.